Red Hat hires lead JRuby developers alongside Engine Yard partnership

Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo will continue their work on JRuby at Red Hat

Charles Nutter and Tom Enebo, key developers behind the JRuby project, are joining Red Hat. The news was announced at JRubyConf 2012 this morning and later confirmed by Nutter on Twitter.

JRuby is an open source implementation of the Ruby programming language that targets the Java virtual machine (JVM). It allows the popular Ruby on Rails framework to be used in a Java environment and interoperate with Java code. JRuby offers better performance than the standard C-based Ruby reference implementation in some cases.

Nutter and Enebo were hired by Sun in 2006 to work on JRuby full-time. When Oracle’s acquisition of Sun created uncertainty about the future of JRuby in 2009, they left the company and went to work for Ruby hosting provider Engine Yard. The two remained with Engine Yard until now. Alongside the revelation that Nutter and Enebo are joining Red Hat, Engine Yard announced that it has partnered with the Linux vendor and will continue to support the advancement of JRuby.

Red Hat jumped into the Java middleware market with its 2006 acquisition of JBoss. The company has become a major Java stakeholder and has made considerable investments in Java technology. This makes Red Hat a good fit for employing the leading JRuby contributors. The Linux distributor has a longstanding commitment to open development and will likely be a good steward for the project.

An interesting bit of language stuck out in the announcement. In addition to JRuby, the two developers will also be working on "JVM languages" at Red Hat. I couldn’t help but wonder if there is a connection to Red Hat’s intriguing Ceylon project, an effort by Hibernate creator Gavin King to create a new language that will run the Java virtual machine. Red Hat certainly seems to be interested in expanding the JVM as a platform.